As self-driving vehicles and drones become more common, a University of Kentucky researcher is working to ensure these technologies can communicate and coordinate reliably in real time.
Yang Xiao, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science in the UK Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering, received the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award with $534,264 over five years for his work.
His project, RESONET (REsilient and Secure Operation of NETworked real-time systems), is designed to help self-driving vehicles and drones communicate and execute joint missions seamlessly, making future transportation safer and more reliable.
In this Q&A, Xiao explains more about his research that not only advances transportation safety but also prepares future scientists and engineers to protect the technologies people will rely on every day.
UKNow: What inspired the concept of RESONET and how does it improve existing approaches for coordinating real‑time systems?
Xiao: The RESONET framework was inspired by the increasing need for reliable coordination between autonomous real-time systems. Real-world use includes vehicle fleets, truck platoons, drone swarm control and so on. These applications have significant economic value but bring unprecedented safety challenges, particularly amid the ongoing AI revolution where AI-based decision mechanisms increasingly complement or replace human operators.
Current autonomous vehicles use safety features like adaptive cruise control and onboard intelligence to avoid collisions, but these systems are mostly reactive and do not enable vehicles to coordinate with one another ahead of time. RESONET sees decision making within and between systems as part of the same continuous process.
UKNow: How do you hope RESONET will make people's lives safer or easier?
Xiao: The most significant value of RESONET, regarding human safety and convenience, is providing a redundancy-based reliability guardrail on autonomous actions, particularly when humans delegate more decision power to onboard autonomy. If we imagine future transportation scenes where the roads are flooded with autonomous vehicles and the skies are congested by UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), we do not want them to suffer from large-scale cascading disasters just because a single sensor on one vehicle fails. I hope RESONET's fault-tolerant inter-system coordination mechanism represents a pioneering solution to this futuristic scenario and jump starts relevant research in the community.
UKNow: How will this NSF CAREER Award support you in your discoveries?
Xiao: I feel honored to receive this NSF CAREER Award for supporting my proposed research. The award will enable my research group to acquire critical prototyping materials and perform both proof-of-concept testing and hardware-in-the-loop testing. As a five-year-long support, it gives us flexibility to explore the technical issues, validation scenarios and refine our solutions.
UKNow: How do you envision RESONET being used or extended in the next five to 10 years, particularly in safety-critical fields?
Xiao: In the long term, the primary beneficiary of the RESONET project is the autonomous transportation sector. In vehicle platooning, the ability to maintain coordinated control despite sensor-processor failures or cyberattacks is the difference between a minor technical glitch and a catastrophic pile-up. Alternatively for the domain of drone fleet control, RESONET can be extended to enable coordinated dodging maneuvers and mission synchronization that are crucial for search and rescue. Both application scenes are particularly relevant to Kentucky. Lexington is a major transportation and logistics hub, making it an ideal location to test our vehicle platooning technology. Meanwhile, Eastern Kentucky has recently faced natural disasters where our drone fleet coordination technology could provide critical support.
Beyond technical benefits, this project aims to train a skilled cybersecurity workforce. Prospective UK students will have the opportunity to receive training in distributed systems, network security and applied cryptography. Students will graduate with the skills needed to help protect the nation's critical infrastructure in an increasingly automated world.
